


Potted Plant

by awkwardeye



Series: The D.O.M. Files [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1970s, F/M, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-09 00:41:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7780216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardeye/pseuds/awkwardeye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're not interested in love, but you're interested in a temporary boss. The middle of a romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Potted Plant

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this and posted it on a whim. It's nothing special, but I wanted to deal with something as banal as someone living an unremarkable average life.

The boys don’t come back with the same gleam in their eyes. They come back with cropped hair, scarred skin, and a nihilistic view of the world, wondering what they were fighting for. They’re suddenly smoking cigarettes in front of their mothers and quiet before their lovers, daughters, and sons, until night falls and they can either not sleep or wake, rousing the house, screaming into the night air. Air that was alive with music, joy, and feigned ignorance now rings through with apprehension, a dismal gray air. Gone are the days of a counterculture thriving on the basis of protesting a war against a harmless cause with the arrival of men unwilling to and incapable of smiling. And now, everyone seems to be searching through the rubble beneath their pristine pillows for another path, another excuse to gather and scream and write music laced with bitter disdain.

Ah, but you try not to think of the world filled with the sort of disappointment one feels when they spill their coffee on a document in progress, or when their heel breaks, or when they planned a meal only to realize they’re missing a crucial ingredient. However, it lingers, that pesky disappointment that has infiltrated your life since you began working, providing for yourself. You find yourself gazing wistfully at the el during your lunch break, thinking of how easy it would be to disappear into the next city one day without warning. Perhaps, somewhere else the fog doesn’t hang so low and the sun shines on smooth, unmarred skin and happy, smiling faces. Perhaps, somewhere people wash their wounds under burning light where they should sting less painfully. All of this must go one while you can do little more than look at something so very near being in your palm and fill your head with ifs.

The office smells of fresh paper and ink and is filled with the noise of pens scratching papers (marking them for revisions and jotting down quick notes), the incessant click, click, click of a multitude of fingers running across keyboards, the swish of paper moving to accommodate the typewriters' pace, and the chatter of too many mouths talking at once. A phone slams down, back into the receiver and a man sighs loudly from the corner of the room. Another phone rings and is answered promptly. A door opens, closes, opens again, and then shuts with a slam that would be resounding if the room was quieter. The coffee cup lands with a soft thud on the desk along with three packets of sugar and a silver spoon. Your boss keeps a potted plant on the corner of his desk where it can easily be knocked down if one is a bit too careless on their way around the desk or grabbing something from the desk. There’s a pause in his clicking and then his fingers wrap around the spoon and he clears his throat, dismissing you.

Your boss is, for the most part, a man who attempts to be kind. He’s married and talks about the son whose photos he doesn’t keep on his desk. There’s a framed photograph of himself and his estranged wife on his desk, but no evidence of the child he speaks of with a hint of disappointment in otherwise bright eyes. He often complains about the intricacies of divorce, but doesn’t seem particularly interested in it though he rarely wears his ring. His suits are tailored, but his shoes are almost always scuffed. On calm days, he likes to talk about politics and admitted rather begrudgingly that his son deserted his post when he was drafted, but didn’t mention how that worked out. Since you started working here, he’s left six times to travel for both business and personal matters. During those times, you’ve had nothing to do, but shuffle through stacks of paper and look forward to your next break while the people who sit closest to you prattle on about the latest fashions and the state of the country.

You take your break everyday at the same time: a quarter past one in the evening. It’s a quiet time and most people have already taken their lunch by the time you even consider leaving your desk. There’s a handful of smokers outside today, standing by the entrance and speaking quietly. They’re usually interesting to watch for all of their banality. This one steals glances at that one and that one admires the other one and so on and so forth. They’re quiet people for the most part: soft-spoken men and sad women, young, searching for something more. The mannerisms are the interesting part. The man who always stays late to finish the day’s work, for example, has a habit of cupping his left ear when his fiancée joins him to share a cigarette. A woman who speaks quickly while enunciating every word carefully has a gaze that lingers on women’s bodies and she purses her lips and flares her nostrils whenever she’s caught. A young janitor taps his cigarette against his thigh three times before he lights it.

Three, you feel is and has always been an important number. One is wonderful, as is two, but three… There’s something about it. There are three people in a small picturesque family: two parents and a child. There are three people in an affair: two lovers and a third hanging off of one of the two. Three of something is always either desirable or uncomfortable. Three kisses from one you yearn for are welcomed easily as you turn your face as if to say, “Here, place them here and here and don’t forget one here.” But turning down a persistent admirer three times seems excessive, unnecessary, and a burden that should have been realized at once. And reaching for and missing a person’s outstretched hand three times fills one’s lungs with a panicky desperation like trapping yourself in a small room. For a minute, you’re fine as you fiddle with the knob and push the door. By the second minute, you twist the knob a bit harder and knock. By the third, the walls have closed in on you and you cannot breathe as you pound on the door, call out, and ram the door as if it should give on this third time. Similar to orgasms or bad lovers, you suppose. In such aspects, three isn’t so very wonderful, but still important for everything after is caused by that catalyst three. Trois, as the French call it. But it can be wonderful when counting long awaited embraces or mornings spent waking up beside someone who warms the coldest parts of your existence.

You consider yourself a simple person. You work a simple job. You say simple things. You listen to simple music. You are simple in your admiration of art in general. You live beside simple people. You walk alongside simple people. You went to a simple school. You wear simple skirts and wear simple shoes. Simple is comfortable. But you crave the intricacies of your past when you settle into bed after another simple day unlike the one before. But three keeps you grounded in simplicity for it is not as outrageous as four or five or even ten.

But back to the man who taps his cigarette three times against his thigh and then on to the number three again on its own. There are three signs that precede his appearance (reappearance or rebirth as he’ll call it one day when you confront him). The first sign comes in the form of a white envelope that you deliver to his father who has always been careful to maintain the sort of distance from you that many fathers keep between themselves and their growing sons turning quickly into young men. It is for that reason that you find yourself comfortable around him, placing him into the kindest category you can place people into: the idle category.

There are three categories you regard people in: the Idle, the Waiting, and the Likely. The idle consists of mainly platonic relationships, holding only people who have little to no desire to sleep with you or spare you any roses. The Idles don’t want to kiss your lips to say they desire your romance, which you vehemently would deny at any rate. The Idles are the equivalent of knowing you can hold someone else’s hand and thinking of how you could go about it, but feeling no true desire to actually reach out and touch that hand for no reason other than to hold it. The deciding factor for the Idles, though, is that they don’t taint your relationship with romance or sex. By default, parents and relatives and friends are all Idles because they never seek to stretch, bend, or break any boundaries. Rarely, at the most, will they ever attempt such a thing. You are impartial toward the Idles and they return the sentiment. The Waiting have both the knowledge that they can and the desire to do, but won’t act unless they know for a fact that you, too, are Waiting. In that sense, they are very much like children testing boundaries. A brush of the hand here and a lingering glance here hope to translate to something poetic or vulgar depending on the person. You welcome the vulgar and ignore the poetic for the most part; the world has always hated poets, but loved poetry, while you have never favored either. That is if calling it the poetic is a way of referring to romance. The Waiting will spring if given the opportunity. You have no preference for them. The Likely are your favorite. They are clear and want and take you. The Likely are an array of past lovers and current lovers. They don’t wait for the train to stop to gravitate toward the doors, but are already at the door before the train has realized that it should stop. They come quickly like sudden showers of rain that wet your hair on your way to work. Never asking, but doing, they guide the way through impenetrable darkness as if they have traveled this road many times before. Even the most hopeless romantic is made wonderful through being Likely for they make romance and love seem so inviting and right for you even though you know you’re not in need of either.

Returning to the topic of the white envelope, you ask your boss about it because he is Idle and you know he will answer honestly without considering how your view of him will change his prospects. He is entirely comfortable in your relationship. He’s as simple as you are and can be summed up as a man who cannot be grounded and finds his stability in the ever-changing air. You stand before him with a polite smile, careful not to knock over his potted plant as you place his coffee before him and he opens the envelope.

“It’s a letter,” he says, skimming the letter briefly.

“That’s nice.” You don’t know what else to say, but he hasn’t dismissed you.

“Yes, my wife would like to see me.”

And that is the entirety of the first sign: a letter and a clipped, but polite conversation. It is the loudest sign, seeming to scream at you that some huge change is coming, but you ignore it. It’s little more than a mild surprise to your work day that doesn’t bother you at all. You go out the same night for drinks with your coworkers and spend the night with a man from the second floor of the building. It doesn’t cross your mind again at all. In fact, you don’t even remember it until the second sign arrives and even then it is a fleeting thought that seems so very infinitesimal in the scheme of things.

The second sign is something you aren’t meant to notice, but do. The boss wears new shoes. His cologne is expensive. His hair is darker than usual and styled differently, something reminiscent of a young businessman. He’s preparing to leave, but you’re too caught up in a program you watched the night before to sit and seriously contemplate what something as small as a change in appearance might mean. You owe it to his wife who wants to see him and assume he has a date planned for the night, not grasping that this might mean more.

The third sign arrives with the change. As you’re making his coffee on a particularly dreary day, the office seems subdued in a sense. It’s like you’re all schoolchildren and the principal has stepped into the classroom. You all bow your heads and pretend to be busier, better, smarter than you all are. If the teacher asks a question, even the most unknowing hand rises with confidence to spew out an answer. You were late for work because you went to bed late and you went to bed late because your mother called the night before to check in on you in the most circumvent way she could. Prodding the issue with a long stick rather than her finger, you call it. It’s a simple conversation like every other. You sat at the table with your head propped up on your palm as she went on and on about the neighbors. You could hear the curtains rustle and you knew she was peeking through them.

“Remember David?” she asked.

“Not really,” you admitted.

“He used to follow you around and tease you.” He used to shove your face into the dirt and put worms in your hair.

“Yes.”

“He’s single.”

“I’m seeing someone.” A lie, but necessary.

“Oh, well that’s a surprise.” It wasn’t rude; it was honest.

She lectured you all night about getting too old to settle down happily and settling for someone you don’t love for the sake of settling. You didn’t have the heart to tell her you might never fall in love at this rate and the idea of dying unmarried didn’t bother you in the same way it bothered her. It took the entire night for her to grow tired and several long monologues before she said her final words with an air of accomplishment and allowed you to sleep (you’d dozed off several times without her noticing).

So the third sign is the sudden shift in mood that you don’t notice until you knock on the boss’s door which is closed rather than left ajar.

The man sitting at his desk looks familiar, reminds you of a complicated, but simple enough time. His hair is long, shaggy, and so black it seems to absorb all of the color around it, leaving the room tinted gray. He slouches in his chair, but inspires a feeling of anxiety that bubbles in the pit of your stomach as you draw closer to him. The look in his shining eyes says that he knows you, but you can’t connect a name to his face, a sensitive face.

“Han didn’t mention you,” he says. You think he’s a bit young to address the boss by his first name, but hold your tongue. “Do you bring his coffee an hour late every morning?” There’s not a hint of amusement in his tone. “Silent as ever… Are you going to continue to pretend to not know me?”

“I-I-”

“Forget it. I don’t want coffee.” He waves his hand to dismiss you.

His hands draw you in. Long, pale fingers are topped by clean, clipped nails. His hands are bare. They’re an open invitation waiting to be held. Though you’ve always considered yourself to be somewhere between Waiting and Likely, today you are Idle: knowing that can, but not truly wanting to. You can hold this stranger’s hand if you want, but you don’t want to. That’s what you tell yourself as you take the coffee that he hasn’t looked at.

“Do you want anything else?” you ask.

“Lift your skirt, sit on the edge of the desk and I’ll get around to fucking you,” he murmurs, without bothering to look at you. (He’s a Likely.) So you stand completely still while he reads over some files, making occasional noises of disdain, but not telling you to leave any more than he’s telling you to stay.

“How do you know me?” you ask, choosing to ignore his words.

“We played with each other,” the man replies.

“What’s your name?”

“Kylo Ren.”

You can’t help but think you would remember such an odd name, but here you stand, not knowing that name in the same way you don’t know the age of a random stranger. It’s unfamiliar and strange. And what does he mean by you played together? As children? Teenagers? Adults? Then the word ‘played’ means something much different than running after each other.

“What are you waiting for? I know you heard me,” he snaps, eyes flickering up your form in a cursory glance.

“You sound like a dirty old man,” you mutter.

“Maybe I am.”

Kylo Ren is a dirty old man. He smells of leather, wine (which he drinks every morning before he even glances at the day’s tasks), and cheap cologne. His desk is almost always clean of all materials except those he needs immediately: the phone, whatever documents he’s working on, and, surprisingly, the potted plant remains on the edge. When you ask about the state of his desk, he tells you that it’s convenient to keep it clean lest one of his visitors knock something over in their excitement. He wears all black and sweeps through the building like the reaper come to collect a few souls for lunch. His gaze is intense, so intense that one can hardly meet it for more than a few moments shy of a minute before they begin to feel deeply inadequate. Without a sense of humor, he’s still a vulgar man who finds every opportunity to sexualize the simplest of situations. He’s in a constant state bordering on the beginning of arousal.

But there’s something about all of his darkness that brightens your days. Perhaps, it’s the spontaneity of his life and the way by which he chooses to live it. Sure of himself, almost too confident, he demands respect for even the smallest feats. A day without his ever flaring temper resulting in the destruction of his office calls for a night of celebration with the office where he drinks and drinks, and gets crueler and ruder as his sobriety slips. He has a habit of mocking his employees when he drinks and he’s been so terrible that the staff has changed slowly as he weeds out the weak and tosses them away or leads them to the lowest cliff where they do the dirty work themselves. Kylo Ren is always at least slightly drunk. He keeps a silver flask of rum on him at all times, asks for whiskey for lunch, and reprimands you when you bring food along with his drink, saying that it’s a shame to drink and eat. You find yourself looking less at the el and glancing more often at his office door, wondering what he’s doing behind the heavy blinds.

Kylo Ren doesn’t know what he’s doing behind a desk. He complains often that he should be attending this event or this one, tells you that you’re too young to be kept in an office and says the same of himself, and criticizes the president so vehemently that spit gathers at the corners of his mouth and flies occasionally as he complains himself into a frenzy. Childish, he makes everything a game in which he watches you run around in circles to keep him from sending his fist through another window. He brags about dodging the draft one evening, but his qualms with the war aren’t the same as your own. His own life was on the line while you were swept up in the counterculture, unbothered and unaffected by the possibility of being sent to death at the hands of an unclear cause. And sometimes he talks about that cause, sometimes he recalls conversations with his friends who weren’t as clever as him with eyes so cold they freeze your body and he talks about how some of them died without knowing what they were dying for. He says some went to kill foreigners for the glory. He describes the faded light in youthful eyes and his own eyes dull like rotting wood. And you come to crave conversations in which he spills his casuistries for the way his eyes hide nothing. How you enjoy eyes that hide nothing…

 One evening as he’s speaking on the telephone, he holds his hand up for you to wait after you place a bottle on the table. A dry wine – which you don’t particularly like – stares at you and you distract yourself with the potted plant, shifting its dark leaves around to find some order in the mass of tangled leaves and stems. The purple undertone shows nicely beneath the gray beams of light that filter in through the slits of the blinds.

“You like that thing, don’t you?” Kylo asks, gesturing toward the plant.

“I’ve never thought about it,” you reply.

“What’s wrong with your lip?” His eyes linger a moment on your split lip before returning to your eyes.

“I fell,” you reply.

“That’s a lie.”

“It certainly sounds that way.” But it’s the truth. You were drunk after another Kylo Ren celebration and lost your footing on the stairs. It didn’t hurt when you split it, but your lip burns whenever you speak and the forming scab splits anew, staining the edges of the cut with fresh blood so that your skin is flushed around the ring of skin paler than normal that separates the actual wound from purple, bruised skin that aches when touched.

“The last time I saw you,” he begins, but cuts himself off.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing, it doesn’t matter if you don’t remember it.”

“I’m curious now.”

“What do you mean by that? You never thought about whether or not you like the plant…”

“I’ve never considered liking something like it. It’s a dreary, drooping thing.”

“And me, aren’t I dreary?”

“Do you think I like you?” You smile to yourself. “I’ve never thought about it.”

“Liking me?” Kylo asks, leaning forward and watching you toy with the plant.

“I never thought about whether I do or don’t,” you murmur.

“What do you like?”

“I like… drinking water on hot days, wearing skirts that swirl around my thighs, my neighbors’ taste in music, and, ah, well, I like sex.”

Kylo’s office is silent, still. And then he begins drumming his fingers against his desk while he stares at you, a smirk twisting his lips. Rain pelts the windows, filling the quiet with a different beat that reminds you of the way your kitchen sink leaks in the middle of the night. That constant drip, drip, drip of water against the empty sink plays as the soundtrack to your midnight endeavors as you forage through the fridge. He drags his fingers through his hair, adjusts his posture, and chuckles softly after too long, obviously having convinced himself that you’re joking. You don’t care what he thinks; only that he responds.

“Have you ever been in love?”

You hesitate.

“Don’t be so shy…”

“No.”

“No, you’ve never been in love.” He reaches into his pocket.

“Yes. I think I enjoy sex too much to fall in love,” you reply, touching your lip tentatively.

Kylo taps his cigarette and nods, humming to let you know that he heard you. He seems to contemplate your words, nodding again, and then he lights his cigarette with a cheap lighter (the kind sold in corner stores that have a plastic case that snaps too easily). Again he lets the silence stretch on, taking his time to think of a response and you’re convinced he’s going to either dismiss you or change the subject when he murmurs, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes sense to me.”

“Then make it make sense to me,” Kylo says.

You’ve always considered love to be something that avoided you. For the majority of your life you’ve been repulsed by it beside your name. To think ‘I love this person’ would feel like an ultimate fallacy and would burn your mind even if you were only testing out the thought without feeling a thing. And your heart never fluttered or skipped a beat. And your stomach never twisted or filled with butterflies brushing dainty wings along your insides. And you’ve never looked at someone and seriously thought that perhaps you love this person in a romantic way. Over the years you’ve come to blame this on the fact that you don’t much like having sex too many times with the same person and no one seems willing to take a lover or coax a person into loving them when that lover or person isn’t completely satisfied by them alone. It’s led to a couple of arguments and bruises, but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll simply stop having sex with other people and, while that is highly unlikely, you feel it’s impossible for anyone to love you. But you enjoy sex too much to stop your habit for long enough to fall in love.

Kylo smokes his cigarette while you explain. He moves to the window, hooks his fingers in the blinds, and stares out at the world. The roads are slick and fog swallows the line of the horizon bit by bit until it fades into white nothingness. People on the street are walking on with imaginations too weak to even consider someone like Kylo is listening to someone like you explain your issues with love and sex clashing. Even if there is a person imaginative enough to think of such, they could never settle on how he’ll respond when you finish talking and he digests the information. Perhaps:

“Maybe someone would love you if you weren’t such a whore.”

Or maybe:

“Well, I suppose that makes sense.”

But never:

“Why haven’t we had sex yet?”

“Why do you think we should have?” you ask, slowly, dreading his answer.

“Because I’ve told you that I want to,” Kylo responds, as if this is the most obvious answer he could have given.

“Are you in love with me?”

“What do you want me to say?” He sounds frustrated.

“I like the plant,” you mumble.

“Then take it.”

You take the next week off, too embarrassed to face Kylo. Your face burns just thinking of him so you spend your time staring out of the window and filling your head with the voices of your neighbors to keep from filling your head with thoughts of him. But there are bits of him everywhere. The painter who lives downstairs has such beautiful white hands, but they’re always covered in paint and glue. The woman upstairs has such familiar lips, but they’re never worked into a pout. The teenager behind the counter at the deli has shaggy hair that’s too long, but he keeps it covered by a hair net. But you still think of Kylo when you see those pieces of him that you hadn’t realized belong to him until now. And there’s that damn potted plant sitting on the kitchen table that doesn’t seem to need your care to grow. All it does is remind you of him. You dig through the mess he leaves behind and try to find him with closed eyes.

On the seventh day, you stare at the potted plant, at the deep purple that taints the dull green of the leaves and swallows its stems and decide that it’s best to return it; it wasn’t Kylo’s to give away and keeping it here only makes your heart beat so painfully. You think of him and you forget to breathe. The seventh day ticks by slowly and the veteran next door yells so loudly at his wife. You dream of the el awake, imagine boarding it and leaving without turning back. You think of a town that doesn’t stink of the aftermath of the war, of lovers who don’t grow attached quickly, of people who don’t ask you about love when what they want is sex. You dream of a Likely who doesn’t turn you into an Idle in terms of inability to move forward.

The next time you see him, you decide, you’ll hand him the plant and say, “I’ve thought about it and I love you, but I don’t want you.”

 


End file.
